Seven years on, despair shrouds Nirbhaya's convict's home - and colony

Narrow, steep and blue, it's a stairway to despair at the end of which lives a mother, caught between the horror of her son being convicted in the gangrape and murder of a woman known the world over as "Nirbhaya", the fearless one, and the desperate hope he is spared the noose.

Seven years after that night of December 16 when the 23-year-old physiotherapy intern was savagely gangraped and left for dead on a Delhi street, the mother is fatigued, weary and defiant all at once, refusing to even give her full name.

Her son Vinay Sharma is one of the four men along with Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta and Akshay Kumar Singh awaiting execution in the case that made global headlines and galvanised a movement for change in the country's rape laws.

Of the other two convicted in the case, Ram Singh allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail in 2015 and the sixth, a juvenile, was sentenced three years of punishment in a reform home and released in 2015.

Four of the six men lived in Ravidas Camp, the ...